Spending Karma tools? Options

[Ratman]

I have found some tools to create characters. Is there a tool to spend Karma on created characters?

Ratman

[Kanada Ten]

IIRC, the NSRCG can do that once you finalize the character. For pre-existing characters you have to enter it once (rule-off if you don't have the original copy), but after that little pain it's not so bad - and it can be used for karma and money.

[Ratman]

Does NSRCG work with SR4? My mistake. I forgot to put that in the first post.

Ratman

[craigpierce]

nope, it doesn't.

and nope, i don't think there is an SR4 character creator or other app. that accounts for existing characters.

not yet anyway.

[Dashifen]

patience, patience :) unfortunately, I'm working on the generation portion first, with the karma spending portion of the program following, but as long as it looks like people are interested in using the tool I'm working on when I get it done, I see no reason why I couldn't add what you're looking for, Ratman.

[Ratman]

Dashifen,

Cool. I am interested. Thank you for taking your personnel time to work on a program to save time for the rest of us.

Ratman

[Brahm]

Daegann's Character Generator sort of does it.
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...995#entry321725

It tracks both karma and BP for stuff you add to the character. Lots of cavets though. After you build the character you'd make a note of the karma rating at that point as the zero starting point. You'd also have to make sure you handled equipment additions outside of the program because it is constantly tracking the cost of that and adding 1BP/2Karma for every 5,000 :nuyen: of equipment. This gets very screwy when you start adding 'ware to your character during play because you have to take the cost of the 'ware/5000 into account and change the zero starting point for the karma.


Karma Character Builds

You shouldn't really try to use that program for a Karma build like BeCKS because it uses 1BP for 1 Karma for metahuman types. There has only been one person that I know of that wrote out and posted a system that is similar to BeCKS, and when they did that they also changed the karma costs for improving Attributes and Skills so it makes it of little use unless you want to deviate from the rules that much.

It is going to take a while for there to be enough experience with SR4 to properly design a BeCKS equivalent, and frankly very little need for it until some more books come out. The imbalance between BP and karma in SR4 isn't nearly as bad as SR3, character creation has some extra flexibility, and there is very little currently available outside character generation that is not addressed inside character generation. Those are the key areas that BeCKS was aimed at.